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I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

Sharon Olds

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Sharon Olds
Age: 54
Climate Activist
Feminist
Poet
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Speaking
Learned
Pleasure
Pain

More quotes by Sharon Olds

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Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Sharon Olds
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I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
Sharon Olds
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The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.
Sharon Olds
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This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
Sharon Olds
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I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.
Sharon Olds
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Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
Sharon Olds
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Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
Sharon Olds
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I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
Sharon Olds
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Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.
Sharon Olds
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If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
Sharon Olds
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Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.
Sharon Olds
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.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.
Sharon Olds
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When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.
Sharon Olds
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A family is a mystery.
Sharon Olds
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At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.
Sharon Olds
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I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.
Sharon Olds
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I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
Sharon Olds
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When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.
Sharon Olds
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The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.
Sharon Olds
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There is something in me maybe someday to be written now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.
Sharon Olds